Successes in Afghanistan. Military and Civil Victories.
Why are the British in Afghanistan?
People are asking the question. Straw polls taken in the street produce vague answers. Most people rely on minimal amounts of information and don’t look further than their daily newspaper or the news broadcasts on the TV, radio, or the internet so if, for example, all the BBC ever does is report on the latest deaths of British service personnel (and rightly so), but then exclude reports on what has been achieved then it’s not surprising that people end up uninformed or misinformed.
A disproportionate amount of air time was given to the MPs expenses scandal in comparison to the events in Afghanistan. The MPs fiddled a few million of public money into their own pockets, but the war in Afghanistan is costing us billions. Shouldn’t we be seeing daily progress reports on how our money is being spent?
The war could be lost not because it’s not winnable in a military sense but because public opinion ebbs away. The next time someone asks you why British men and women are there at all you might want to mention some of the following achievements.
Successes in Afghanistan (largely unreported):
* al-Qaeda denied a safe haven for training camps in which to train terrorists for attacks on the West
* Most heavy weapons siezed from disparate militia groups
* Tens of thousands of militia forces disarmed and demobilized
* Power of warlords greatly diminished
* Former militants persuaded to join the political and economic processes
* Afghan National Army growing and being given training
* Afghan National Police growing and being given training
* Refugee Afghans who had fled the Taliban returned in hundreds of thousands
* Infrastructure hugely improved with new roads, schools, hospitals and other civil buildings
* Power and water restored or provided for the first time in many areas
* Women freed from draconian Taliban oppression
* People freed from barbaric forms of summary justice
* Hundreds of thousand of girls and boys in school for the first time
* Pakistan on the offensive and routing the Taliban in former ‘no go’ areas in the NW Frontier
Withdrawl would mean:
* The Taliban and al-Qaeda would return, both claiming a moral and military victory
* Renewed strength of the Taliban and al-Qaeda could de-stabilise Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons)
* Deaths and injury of personnel would have been in vain
Here’s a summary of military operations from 2001 to present.
There’s plenty of blogs and other sites that list what are perceived as failures in the campaign, so I’m not going to repeat them here.
If you know of any details of the successes then please use the comment form to add submit them to the list.
